


what, then, could she complain of, except that she had been loved?

by Pingoodle (ThatAloneOne)



Category: Orpheus and Eurydice (Metamorphoses - Ovid)
Genre: Deaf Character, F/M, but do I change it? absolutely!, deaf!Eurydice, do I fix it? maybe!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-26
Updated: 2020-02-26
Packaged: 2021-02-28 01:34:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22915561
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThatAloneOne/pseuds/Pingoodle
Summary: "Come, little one," she signed, for at least this half-alive thing could understand her in the way that Orpheus’s turned back could done. She would have been angrier at Hades for this, for forbidding speech, had Persephone not signed asafe, and another sign that Eurydice knew, as did most women like her. Persephone had told herwait-watch-trust-I-stand-with. So Eurydice knelt by the goddess’s snake and invited it into her arms. It came, willingly, twining up her arm and resting its head in the cup of her collarbone.
Relationships: Eurydice/Orpheus (O&E - Metamorphoses - Ovid)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 7
Collections: Once Upon a Fic 2020





	what, then, could she complain of, except that she had been loved?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rokosourobouros](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rokosourobouros/gifts).



> Title is from the original myth, from [here](https://ovid.lib.virginia.edu/trans/Metamorph10.htm#484521418). This is a gift for rokosourobouros for Once Upon A Fic, and I hope you enjoy the fic + the rest of the exchange!
> 
> Please be impressed by me flexing my "I've taken two Classics courses in university" knowledge with all that snake as fertility stuff. Shedding stuff = constant renewal = fertility. Plus, snakes are commonly found in agricultural places cause they eat all the rodents that eat the growing food. Hence, they're heavily associated with Demeter. None of the rest of this is from my #education but the snakes are IMPORTANT, I tell you!
> 
> This story works best if you're familiar with Orpheus and Eurydice, but also with Persephone's myth about pomegranates and staying in the underworld.

It stung, more than the dying, that Eurydice was to have no say in her own resurrection.

Orpheus had begged for her, and she loved him. She loved the way the words always spilled from his hands and mouth and lyre, the way his songs pressed in gentle flutters against her skin.

He sung of sorrow, and in his fingers she read the story of how he had tried to move on, to accept that she was dead and gone. Love won out, he pleaded, fingertips raw from the strings of his lyre.

She loved him, but she understood that it was for his sake and not hers that he was coming to find her. He missed her and wasn’t whole without her and that was why. Her years had been stolen from her — the years that he had thought she was going to spend on him. She would have, and she still would, given the chance but-

Her death was a tragedy to her more than it could ever be a tragedy to him.

Persephone met her eyes from her place at Hades’ side. Her lips, stained pomegranate-purple, twisted in what might have been a smile. She had been watching Orpheus’ hands, Eurydice realized, not his lips. Eurydice’s fingers twitched at her sides, aching to ask but-

Orpheus’ song had ended. It was judgment time. Persephone turned her head away, her hair swinging to lay across her husband’s shoulder as silken adornment.

* * *

The way out of the Underworld was longer than the way in. Orpheus followed the Styx’s pebble-studded edge with dogged determination, like he could see an exit up ahead where Eurydice only saw blackness. She watched his shoulders heave with no small amount of concern, knew he had to be spinning a thousand tales aloud to keep from turning. Every so often he tried to send his musings back at her, hands awkwardly tucked behind his back, but it was a lost cause.

It wasn’t until the third cascading falls of the Styx that Eurydice noticed she had a follower of her own. One viper looked about the same as the other, but Eurydice could see the crookedness of its spine, that place where her husband had snapped its neck in rage. The viper didn’t move the way it used to, twining around its broken place the same way as she limped on her bitten ankle. Mindful of Orpheus’s place ahead of her on the path and her own silence, she knelt by the viper. It watched her, head raised as far from the packed under-earth as its injured neck would allow it. Its scales were all but soft beneath her fingers, bright and newly revealed from a shed.

Maybe that was why Persephone had taken it, as a favour to her mother. A reminder of things always renewing, of injured things going on and death being but a step in the journey.

“Come, little one," she signed, for at least this half-alive thing could understand her in the way that Orpheus’s turned back could not. She would have been angrier at Hades for this, for forbidding speech, had Persephone not signed a _safe_ , and another sign that Eurydice knew, as did most women like her. Persephone had told her _wait-watch-trust-I-stand-with_. So she knelt by the goddess’s snake and invited it into her arms. It came, willingly, twining up her arm and resting its head in the cup of her collarbone.

She cradled it as she stood, absently spelling protection and naming over its curves. Orpheus hadn’t managed to get too far ahead, but she scrambled to catch up anyway. His outline was beginning to glow with a kind of light that was antithetical to this dark world, like the sun had found him and seized him by the edges. The brighter the light got the sharper the rocks beneath her feet seemed.

A while after that, past the rapids that sent Styx-water mud up onto the shore, Eurydice made out the door. Orpheus’s glow faded now that the door was visible. She could almost imagine they were coming out of a cave above the earth, like she’d expected to see the sun again. Like this was possible and her end was still far off in the distance instead of anchored already in her precious viper and aching wound.

Through the door lay stairs, stacks of them piled haphazardly in bars of shining sunlight. Orpheus besieged them, Eurydice lagging behind with her muscles suddenly burning with exertion, her snake an unwieldy burden.

Before she had understood it, had recovered from the pain that life was pouring into her body, her husband had reached the top. He turned before she could try and stop him and-

One of her feet was still on the last slate step, the side where the snake lay resting still shrouded in shadow. But her heart beat now, her breath coming in rough pants, the soles of her feet damp with blood and Styx mud. She had thought that she was still too close to death but it was okay, she was okay, and Orpheus was gathering her in his arms like he had never held anything more precious, sobs shaking his chest like a song. Eurydice buried her head in her husband's neck, tasting his salt-sweat through her mouthed prayers.

* * *

Her ankle didn’t get better, but at least it didn’t often get worse. A month in, when Orpheus realized she was still waking up with bloodied sheets, he’d sung a payment to the healer he knew from the _Argo_. Walking became easier with the bandage, and with the blood kept from spilling far the wrinkle between Orpheus’s eyes was beginning to fade. He was starting to sing again for pleasure, too, not just to trade for food and fresh-pressed wine and the comforts of their home.

Eurydice had changed too. She stayed up late at night now, laying against her husbands chest and listening to him hum melodies in progress. Some days she’d make it all the way through again to dawn, awake and quiescent long past when Orpheus’s hymns had dropped away to snores.

Her viper insisted on staying by her side, so she wove a new basket with room to spare. When she wove at night it curled in the basket next to her threads and wool, disguised by the twists of brown dyed scrap. Orpheus had either great ignorance or great tolerance, for he had yet to mention the snake to her. It was clearly easier for him, forgetting that she had been gone at all.   
Eurydice still wasn’t sure that she was back. Not really, not fully. She wove through the night two days in a row and hid her silver-threaded shroud at the bottom of her basket

* * *

More months passed, and they were good months. Eurydice wove with a fury, smoothed seeds into the rich earth with something approaching fixation. Her snake and her learned to plait her hair, settling a knot against the base of her skull where it would stay out of the way. Orpheus sang like he never had before, like the notes were bursting out of his chest and swimming in his lungs. He rewrote more and more music to his adapted playing, letting him croon sweet nonsense at Eurydice without losing the accompaniment of his lyre.

“I can read your lips, you know,” she told him. The sun was baking them both, but the coolness of the approaching fall breeze was enough to even it out.

“It’s _art_ ,” he said-signed, mock offended. She confiscated his lyre, strumming out patterns that felt good rattling in her chest. Her snake hissed against her neck, the faintest tickle of a vibration. “I sing for you too, you know. It’s not a concession. It’s what I want.”

“I know,” she said, and strummed a combination of strings that had him clutching at his ears while she snickered

* * *

She asked, sometime in the middle of all of this, what Orpheus had said to Hades, the time he had been begging for her. What he’d said, when he chanted things till his breath went ragged on the trip back to the open sky.

He told her: he had to spoken to Hades about inevitability.

He told her: they were all bound to this place, Asphodel or Elysium or Tartarus regardless, no matter what.

He told her: Death knew that all people belonged to him, in the end, and giving them more time to live just meant destiny could tell a more interesting tale in the parts between.

* * *

Harvest was all but finished and still, the pomegranates weren’t ripe. As the threat of frost grew, so too did the piles of offerings at the entrance to the grove. Most people left food, cuts of beef and mutton and whole fresh fruits. Scattered dried pomegranate from years before littered the soil like they’d fallen as hail. One child had left a clumsily carved ram, blackened sacred with ash.

It had been a week since Eurydice last slept. Even the soft peace of lying curled in her marriage bed was waning, replaced with something gnawing and restless. She paced the house first, then her near-dead plot of growing things.

The night it frosted, Eurydice understood. She left Orpheus in his bed, a kiss pressed to his forehead and a new wool blanket draped over him, black as the shadows of the Underworld. She took her snake in its basket out to the orchard and laid it out at the foot of the foremost tree, the trees' burdens hanging heavy over her head. Her snake joined her, crawling up her arm just like every time before, leaving her intricate shroud alone in her offering basket.

When she plucked down the first pomegranate, it yielded to her touch. Even under the faint moonlight, the inside was the rich red of hearts blood. It tasted as tart as every time before. It tasted like she’d never eaten anything before in her life, like this was the first and last thing that mattered. Her snake loosed her hair around her shoulders, wrapping around and around her neck like a queen’s necklace. Still awkward in its broken body but no lesser for it, it licked the red from her fingers. 

**Author's Note:**

> I've had some spare time and energy, but mental block around starting things. Writing a gift was wonderful cause I got a prompt _and_ a purpose. Thank you to the mods for everything about the exchange!
> 
> And one more note: I've put Eurydice here as profoundly / completely deaf + with sign language as her main mode of communication. I'm only halfway deaf and am only now beginning to learn ASL, so YMMV. (Also yes, I know lip reading isn't magical or perfect but Orpheus trying to sing, sign, and play the lyre all at once _is_ a little bonkers.)
> 
> I also only discovered this song after writing the story, but [Marbles](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJvRTZmz2nY) by The Amazing Devil has the longing lines "You stole the best years of my life / I’ll give them back" and that is the heart of this story in a way.


End file.
